Aspirin, Vitamin E Disappoint

They Don't Cut Risk Of Cancer, Researchers Say

July 6, 2005|By David Brown The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Neither low-dose aspirin nor vitamin E supplements prevent cancer in women, and vitamin E also does little or nothing to prevent heart disease in them, according to results of a large and authoritative study released Tuesday.

The findings from the 40,000-person Women's Health Study add to the growing evidence that vitamin E pills have no health benefit, but run counter to the rising tide in favor of wider use of aspirin to prevent disease.

The study hinted the two compounds might offer some protection against disease in some women, results that in the case of vitamin E were already being touted by "dietary supplement" advocates. It's also possible a higher dose of aspirin might have had a cancer-preventing effect not seen with the low dose used in the clinical trial. That's a question still worth exploring, the researchers said. But for the moment their advice is against routine use of either substance by healthy women.

"When you look at the total package, I would not recommend that somebody take vitamin E supplements for the purpose of reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease or cancer," said Julie E. Buring, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston, who led the study.

"The best thing for prevention is to follow a healthy lifestyle, eat a healthy diet, exercise, and avoid smoking," said Nancy Cook, a collaborator who is also at Brigham and Women's. The Women's Health Study was launched in the early 1990s with two goals that transcended questions about aspirin and vitamin E.

It sought to test in women several disease-prevention strategies that had been tried in men, as extrapolating results from one sex to the other is often misleading. It tried to get the most believable answers by randomly assigning women to take the drugs or supplements in question rather than simply observing the experience of women who, for one reason or another, chose to take them on their own.

The decade-long, $40 million study met both goals even though the substances under study proved largely ineffectual. The final report appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

The 39,876 women in the study were all health-care professionals. None had evidence of either cancer or cardiovascular disease. Half were assigned to take 100 milligrams of aspirin every other day, or a placebo. The standard aspirin pill, taken to relieve pain or reduce fever, is 325 milligrams.

Half were also assigned to take 600 international units of vitamin E every other day, or a placebo. Neither they nor the scientists found out what they were taking -- two active substances, or one or two placebos for the 10-year life of the study.

Originally, half the volunteers were also assigned to take beta-carotene or a placebo. That part of the study was dropped after two years because a 12-year-long trial of that vitamin A-like compound in men found no benefit, and two other studies suggested it might promote lung cancer.

There were 1,438 cases of cancer in women taking aspirin and 1,427 in those taking the placebo -- no significant difference. In the women taking vitamin E there were 308 cancer deaths and in those taking the placebo there were 275 -- again, not a significant difference, given that each group had almost 20,000 people.